On New Ideas

For nearly a year, this website has been gathering dust, only growing by a single book review and a page on apples. Of the latter, to be fair, I’m very proud, and I have plans to continue it as long as apples bless the Earth. But for all my talk of sharing, I’ve been far too quiet.

On the other hand, I have no lack of ideas. There’s a few exciting projects in the works that I can’t wait to share. Countless more bounce around my skull. I’m writing this now to throw some out there, and to give an update on what I’ve been doing to make my website better equipped.

Adding new projects to my site as it was would have been a pain. My code was already getting hacky just to support the basic structure. I want to write, create, and design, not tweak Liquid and HTML for hours. Any more creativity might have pushed the limits of Jekyll—and my sanity.

I probably don’t know what I’m doing, but I decided the best solution was to migrate everything to Hugo. Out of the box, Hugo can handle a nested directory structure, and has a simple system for HTML layouts that makes consistent formatting easy. With Jekyll, when I wanted to create a list of all posts in a category, I needed multiple tags in the front matter and complicated loops. Hugo, on the other hand, reads my directory and does the work for me. Working with Hugo is more intuitive, adaptable, and compatible with my creative vision. So, out with Jekyll!

Having successfully transplanted my site, I’ve been able put the technical behind and start work on a visual redesign. My aesthetic goal is to recreate the warm and readable feel of a book—something surprisingly difficult to do on the web. Poetry Foundation, one place that gets it right, has been a valuable inpiration.

Since last time, I’ve scaled the text for better readability and changed it to dark-on-light (because what book uses dark mode?) I also swapped the font to Garamond, my absolute favorite, especially with old-stle figures. Beyond typography, I’ve made countless other tweaks that, despite how much they matter to me, you probably can’t even notice. Undoubtedly, even more will come after I post this, since I’m now completely obsessed with tweaking the CSS to find the perfect look. I don’t think I can stop.

If I’ve been at all successful, the text should be a lot more pleasant on the eyes. With more room for words to breathe, I also hope the flow of my writing gets some of the benefit. Altogether, I hope these changes are worth the extra lines.

I might design a beaufitul website with nothing on it if I’m not careful with my new obsession. As a reminder, my goal has always been to have a place to share the things I love. A creative portfolio in other words. If mediocre web design is what it is, I guess I should be happy, but I wouldn’t be. I have too many other ideas that need my attention.

The best way to make them come alive then, is to stash them here, no matter how underbaked they may be. At the very least they’ll have added words to a post, and that’s better than being wasted in my brain. I also want the added pressure of my ideas being public, and the progress that comes just by putting things in words.

The first project likely to surface is a simple one. I love to read poetry, and maybe I’d love to write some too. Problem is, poems and websites don’t mix, not easily at least. I’m currently working on, maybe nearly done with, a very, very simple system and workflow to bring poems onto the website without ruining their formatting. I’ll be working on a short post with details if you’re curious.

Around the turn of the year, watch out for another project, this time involving reading, statistics, and data visualization. Since the beginning 2026, I’ve been collecting data on the books I’m reading and on my reading habits. With fine-grained data, I plan to make something better than the underwhelming Year in Books we get from Goodreads. I’ll have some unique aggregate measures, speed curves across pages, and other analysis. I’m using this project as an opportunity to learn how to work with data using tools like Pandas and R. There’s a lot of work yet to be done, but I can’t complain about having an excuse to read.